February 9, 2010
Category: Open Access
Since early days indeed, it's been possible to bypass journal publishers and libraries in a quest for a particular article by going directly to the author. Some publishers have even facilitated this limited variety of samizdat by offering authors a few ready-made offprints.
I've even had publishers give me e-offprints (which to me, preprint disseminator that I am, just feels weird). The repository software ePrints can place an "ask the author" button on items that are withheld from public view for whatever reason. As best I can tell, just about everyone involved in scholarly communication thinks this form of mildly extra-legal distribution is all right.
Times are changing, however, and academic samizdat is taking on new forms. Exactly what the responses will be remains to be seen, but early indicators exist.
Consider website distribution of typeset publisher PDFs, or clumsy scans of typeset articles. This is legion (see Wren 2005 for details), and as any competent institutional-repository manager will tell you, it is often not legal. If you, researcher, signed over your copyright to your publisher, and your publisher did not in turn grant back a license to use the work in this fashion, you have violated the publisher's copyright, and the publisher can sue you for it.
Yes. Really. Planning to read your next publishing agreement now? Good. You gladden this librarian's wizened heart.
Now, suing the producers of your stock in trade is fairly suicidal business practice. Publishers aren't stupid; they know this. They've turned a blind eye to this practice, treating it as an extension of ordinary academic samizdat… for the most part. If you check SHERPA/RoMEO, you find fairly quickly that publishers restrict other forms of samizdat that they find more threatening to their businesses: reposting in disciplinary repositories, notably, and you'll even find a few who object to institutional repositories.
There's a troublesome sign, however: the lawsuit by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and SAGE Publications against Georgia State University. This was reported in the library press as being about practices in library-managed electronic reserves, but as I understand the matter, the presses also objected to articles posted on faculty websites and in university courseware. Twists and turns abound (this seems to be the latest situation), but the case hasn't yet been settled, so there could be a ruling that disallows faculty posting of articles they authored on their own websites.
That would be an interesting day indeed.
Of course, the articles posted might not have been the faculty members' own articles, which opens another can of worms. As access diminishes, both through library-budget impasses and through (perceived or actual) difficulties of securing even access to that which a library has paid for, samizdat flourishes. Through web bulletin boards, through "journal clubs," through chains of friends across institutions, through designated sites, even, samizdat flourishes. As journal-publisher profits are squeezed, this practice will no doubt invite scrutiny.
What will the publishers' response be? Again, suing faculty directly is distinctly unwise, so I don't expect an RIAA-style rathunt with its associated individual lawsuits. (One or two individual suits against particularly egregious examples may turn up pour encourager les autres.) Intermediaries between publisher, author, and reader, however, may be fair game; that's how Georgia State ended up in the crosshairs. I wouldn't want to be the site I linked in the paragraph up above, either.
Some of this samizdat activity is happening on social-networking sites (I won't say which; I'll just note that I've personally seen it). They may become lawsuit targets as well, though the really big ones may well be immune.
Another possibly-litigatable intermediary is the humble citation manager, which is managing entire PDF libraries these days. Zotero implemented its online sharing very carefully indeed: citations, links, and DOIs are shareable, but PDFs are not. They should stay out of trouble. Mendeley, however, appears to have some direct file-sharing features, and may therefore be vulnerable.
And finally we have just plain stupidity, such as that displayed by the people behind OpenThesis. There's been quite a dustup on the ETD-L list over their practice of harvesting thesis metadata and associated content files through OAI-PMH and some custom programming (because OAI-PMH does not enable file exchange) for display and dissemination on their own website.
Let me count the ways in which this is idiocy:
- Dissertations are copyright to their authors; many of these authors take a lively interest in their dissemination. Anyone who's started an electronic thesis and dissertation program can attest to that. Journal-article authors (though not publishers) are laissez-faire by comparison. In fact, it was a thesis author who raised questions about OpenThesis on ETD-L.
- Dissertations made available through institutional-library websites invariably involve some sort of license granted by the author to the institution. We're careful about that kind of thing in libraries. These licenses are not transitive; third parties do not have the same license that the library has by virtue of downloading a copy of the dissertation from the library's site.
- Because librarians have trodden many an eggshell to achieve viable ETD programs, elephant-footed behavior like that of OpenThesis threatens to tar us with a very bad brush. This perhaps helps explain the very cool reception OpenThesis received on ETD-L. Pro tip: angering librarians is bad business for a would-be content purveyor.
- When challenged, OpenThesis claimed (my paraphrase) that anything they found on the open web was fair game, so they meant to go on doing what they were doing. Do these people even have an IP lawyer on retainer? In the US, at least, wilful copyright infringement invites rather heavier penalties.
But these are theses, not articles, Dorothea! What's the relevance to academic samizdat of articles?
I invite you all to consider Scientific Commons. Now there is an outfit ripe for a lawsuit. Interesting times...
Reference:
Wren, J. D. (2005). Open access and openly accessible: a study of scientific publications shared via the internet. BMJ, 330, 1128.
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February 2, 2010
Category: Open Access • Tactics
Perhaps shockingly, I don't plan to so much as try to wade through all seven-hundred-odd pages of this report on scholarly-publishing practices. It's thorough, it's well-documented, it's decently-written… and based on the executive summary (itself weighing in at a hefty 20 pages), it won't tell me a thing I don't already know.
Academia is conservative. Academia thinks its current scholarly-production system is just fine and dandy, thank you. Academia has a love-hate relationship with peer review. Academia wants to outsource its tenure and promotion decisions any way that is convenient and looks just barely irreproachable enough.
None of this is news. It's dispiriting, but it's not news.
I invite you, however, to take a look at the survey population. "45, mostly elite, research institutions" (p. i) they drew their sample from. Just on the face of it—if we're looking for change in scholarly communication, especially disruptive change, elite researchers in well-established disciplines at elite institutions are the wrong place to look.
Of course such researchers don't want the hill disturbed—they're king of it, aren't they? They're the people for whom "sustaining innovation" is designed, in Clayton Christenson's parlance. They're the very tippy-top of the academic prestige market; they are the last to notice, much less use, a disruptive innovation.
For similar reasons, we don't want to look at the big, established journals and publishers for disruptive innovation. Sustaining innovation, yes, plenty of it. But once again, the king of the hill doesn't allow mining underneath him when he can prevent it.
"But there's better light over here under the streetlamp!" goes the old joke. So where might we look instead, despite the darkness? Well, I have some ideas.
Interdisciplinary, inchoate novelties like the "digital humanities." Young, impecunious disciplines. New journals—what is the proportion of OA to TA journal launches these days, and how is that ratio changing? Disciplines where data need a place to live and thrive. Disruptive innovations start where there's a need that the existing market can't or simply won't address.
That's where the action is likely to be—and to be blunt, most of the reason I'm not wading through that Berkeley report is that it doesn't tell me a thing about where I believe the action is.
Still, there are some good bits about data in there, so the executive summary is worth a skim.
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February 1, 2010
Category: Tidbits
Happy Groundhog's Day Eve! Or something.
If you've got a link that belongs in a Trogool tidbits round up, drop me a comment or tag it "trogool" on del.icio.us. Thanks!
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January 30, 2010
Category: Metablogging
I'm getting quite a few more comments here than when I started, which is lovely! To keep the conversation lively and civil, I've put together a comment policy, which you can find on the blog's About page. (I'll link to it from the sidebar momentarily.)
It's mostly common sense. Moreover, I haven't had to edit or delete a non-spam comment here yet.
Still, I'd rather have a policy and not need it than need it and not have it. So now it's there.
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January 29, 2010
Category: Tactics
(My apologies; this post inadvertently went up prematurely. If you were wondering where I was going with it, please read on!)
I met Steve Koch at Science Online 2010, where he wowed me showing off his students' open-notebook-science work. I love, just love, teachers who do that. I wish the sort of work I typically assign students was appropriate to it.
Because of the interactions Steve had with librarians at that conference, he's going back to talk with the digital librarian at his institution to see what they can do for each other.
I love that, too, though it makes me nervous. Consider a comment I got on a previous post:
I'am afraid the greater part of librarians are staring to their belly-buttons, and do not have the attitude or communication skills necessary to connect with their customers.
Ouch. Nor am I prepared to say that's incorrect. So when I send someone like Steve to meet with a librarian, I have to hope for a fruitful interaction. I can't rely on it.
Wondering where the commenter got that impression? Well, let's consider Steve Koch again. In a comment to another FriendFeed post, he said (quoted with permission; paragraph breaks mine, as FF doesn't let commenters paragraph their own comments):
I'm stoked about partnering with librarians going forward. I'm meeting with our digital initiatives librarian next week to learn what we can do regarding open data / open access / open science.
But a year ago, I was clueless about what university libraries were doing. Definitely a lot of that ignorance was my fault. But it makes sense if you think about my trajectory to current position as faculty. As an undergraduate and graduate student, most of my interactions with the library were moderately helpful at best, and sometimes completely hostile. For example, I had a comical (but infuriating at the time) battle over a $25 fine for using a 2-hour reserve textbook overnight (while the library was closed). And then all the frustration with copy machines & copy cards, etc. Basically, it sucked going to the library, and library & librarian were almost the same word.
So, with the advent of PDF, I was pretty much delighted that I never had to go to the library anymore. I discovered Inter-Library Loan and was proud that I didn't even know where the library was. Clearly all prejudices and a not clever on my part. However, I suspect that similar prejudices are shared by many faculty and other scientists.
I can think of two things that can be done: (1) educate current faculty, and (2) make things more pleasant for current grads and undergrads. In regards to (1), it's pretty tough to achieve. One idea would be to put advertisements in emails that deliver PDFs for ILL: "Do you like ILL? Your library can help you way more than that! email: ___"
Method (2) is likely more productive, IMO. I don't know a lot about it, but I suspect that undergrads and grads still have unpleasant relationships with the library. Making those more pleasant and collaborative will make for better partners in the future. Like I said, I don't know a lot about current state of affairs, and if indeed conditions have improved for students, maybe better advertising of that fact is called for?
What are we to take from this, we librarians, if we wish to regain ground among scientists?
- We need to address three market segments: young proto-scientists, practicing scientists who have no idea what we do, and practicing scientists such as Steve who have been actively turned off by libraries and librarians. By and large, it seems to me, we're doing quite a bit to address the first group's needs, not much at all for the second—and nothing whatever for the third.
- It's not enough to "be a library" any more. It has been enough for quite a long time—among other things, libraries were an important source of institutional prestige—but no more. The boundaries of science librarianship in the research institution are becoming the boundaries of the research enterprise. If we're not contributing to the research enterprise, we can expect to be in the gunsights.
- Patron service matters, if we are not to mint more Steve Kochs by the dozen. Every patron turned away from a library by sticklers for rules or unhelpful service is a spadeful of earth from our own grave.
- Our sixth column? Information-literacy instruction. Love your library instructors! They mint future academic-library patrons.
- One more time: we're not going to fix this situation sitting behind desks in a library our target populations don't visit. What Stephanie and Christina and John and Bonnie and Hope and Molly and Paolo and I did to advance librarianship, we did at a science conference.
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January 26, 2010
Category: Open Access
Back in the day, Time Warner merged with AOL. It turned out to be one of the worst merger ideas in the history of merger ideas, and I believe the evidence suggests that most mergers actually turn out to be clunkers!
AOL was simply at the top of its orbit, nowhere but downhill to go.
I wonder, I do, whether Time Warner learned from that experience, and that's why they started shopping exclusive deals to aggregators. (For the record, exclusive deals aren't new in this market.) Grab all the money you can with the exclusivity flag—before the market value of your product declines with a vengeance. Sort of a reverse-AOL maneuver!
I won't recap the death-of-journalism battles here; the basic question "is news being Clayton-Christensen–disrupted by search engines and blogs?" is well-known. I'll just ask you to look over the stable of periodicals at stake in the EBSCO exclusivity deal and form your own conclusions about their future. If I'm right (and I don't know that I am, of course), EBSCO and Gale will wind up with all sorts of egg on their faces.
So, remembering that the news-magazine and scholarly-publishing markets are rather different, can we take any additional lessons about potential publishing-market disruption from this? Perhaps.
The Scholarly Kitchen recently posted an entry arguing (my paraphrase; apologies for any inadequacies therein) that scholarly-journal publishing has avoided an attempted Clayton-Christensen–style market disruption by the open-access movement by fruitful and timely adaptation.
My knee-jerk response at the time that was posted was "So far." Market disruption may seem quick in hindsight, but can take time; OA has had less than a decade (dating from the Budapest Open Access Initiative in early 2002) to make a dent in a rather conservative, traditionalist market whose hegemony has been formed over three centuries or thereabouts. I genuinely believe it's much too early to call this one.
In fact, I'd lay cautious odds on the scenario following:
- Now that libraries have well and truly run out of Big Deal money, the big publisher-aggregators will have to look around for ways to keep their profit margins fat.
- One obvious way is to eliminate small, low-profit journals and their associated production and overhead costs. Some of these journals will just plain fold (not necessarily a bad thing!). Others will find a way to move open-access, setting up potential market disruption (arguably, this is already a "move upmarket" for open access compared to the typical open-access journal).
- More to the point, libraries will protest that they aren't getting as much product as they were for their Big Deal dollar and insist on lowered prices.
- At this point the cycle repeats, destructively from the point of view of a big publisher-aggregator or a low-profit journal. If this cycle really gets going, the resulting bloodbath in journals could be tremendous.
Science Online, the EBSCO furor, and the reaction to my previous posts made me rethink things a bit. My question now is "Which market are we talking about here?"
The scholarly publishing enterprise comprises two markets. (Maybe more than two, but let's stick with two for simplicity's sake.) One is where all the money is sloshing around: libraries, publishers, aggregators, societies, Big Deals, et cetera. The EBSCO-Time Warner market. The other is a prestige market, with different players and different rules.
Why do researchers publish articles? "To communicate their results" is the facile but wrong answer. I know any number of researchers who would be happy to be left alone in their labs to do experiments without having to write those pesky papers. They can't get away with that, though, and that's because they have to prove their worth to their institution and (if they rely on grants) their funders if they wish to remain employed, much less be promoted. In other words, they publish for prestige.
Now, prestige used to be almost entirely subjective. If you were on the tenure track, you went to your mentor or observed your departmental colleagues' publication patterns to sort out where to publish. If you were evaluating a colleague for tenure, you looked down their list and compared it against your mental rankings.
Aside from costing a lot of time and effort to accomplish, this process is messy, as subjectivity tends to be, and messiness in a career-life-or-death tenure situation breeds lawsuits and other such unpleasantness, and who needs that? So along came Thomson/ISI with the "journal impact factor," based on how often a given journal is cited, and researchers all over the world breathed heavy sighs of relief. Here was a number they could use to gauge the importance of a journal, and by extension, the researchers who publish in it.
(The parallels with the role of the FICO score in the US credit bubble are left as an exercise for the reader.)
I cannot overstate the bogosity of the journal impact factor. It is ridiculous, especially as a yardstick for an individual researcher. It should be banned. (Seriously, accreditors, why haven't you told departments that being dumb enough to use it in tenure and promotion decisions counts against them?) But just at present, it has cornered the prestige market. What that means is that the journals it favors (and one important reason the impact factor is bogus is that the way it's calculated is heavily tilted in favor of certain classes of journals, and even certain kinds of articles) have also cornered the prestige market.
How does this affect the money market? Simple. It's extremely hard for a library to cancel a high-impact-factor journal, or get rid of a Big Deal if there's an EBSCO/Time-like exclusive-online-access deal involved on a high-impact-factor journal. The price can go through the roof; libraries' hands are—if not tied, certainly encumbered.
So, the Scholarly Kitchen maintains that the money market in scholarly publishing hasn't been disrupted. What about the prestige market?
Well, one argument in favor of open access is that open-access articles are cited more often than those available only through payment. There are plenty of disputes ongoing about whether and why this may be true, but whatever its truth value (I tend to believe it, based partly on my own experiences), there's no denying that this is an argument aimed directly at the prestige rather than the money market.
Has it been disruptive? … Not so much, really. A few savvy scholars use green open access plus publishing in high-impact-factor journals to raise their personal citation numbers, but only a few. I argued in an article of mine (does this link make me a savvy scholar? perhaps!) that the open-access advantage is counterintuitive to researchers, who want (rather naively) to believe that prestige measures correlate highly to quality rather than to icky questions like money or access.
So much for increased citation impact as a disruptive force. Maybe it should work, but it hasn't.
Smart publishers (both toll- and open-access) and open-access repositories report article download numbers for articles online, because that's another number, and numbers have a hypnotic effect on the psyche. I have heard stories of download counts showing up in tenure portfolios, and I have also heard opposition from health researchers to the NIH Public Access Policy on the grounds that openly-available articles reduce download counts from publishers.
Again, we're firmly in the prestige market here… but notice one difference. Impact factor is a journal-level measure. Downloads are reported by article (or sometimes by author, via elementary addition).
Aha. Could that small change, from journals to articles as the unit of measure, be disruptive to the prestige market? It certainly could. What researcher wouldn't be more interested in his or her own results than in a journal-level proxy? Moreover, some bibliometric investigations have suggested that journal impact factor mostly doesn't derive from the general quality of the published content as a whole, but from a few superstar must-cite articles. Once article-level statistics make that clear, it's a significant blow to the journal impact factor and potentially even to journals as brands.
How does that work? Well, in the current environment many researchers, willingly or forced, chase high-impact journals and journal brands at all costs, ignoring other competitive factors like reach, quality of service, speed of publication, excellence of text artisanry, and so forth. Once the impact factor's back is broken by article-level statistics (should that happy day ever arrive), those other factors return to the playing field. If your vaunted "brand" didn't get my last article read, says Dr. Helen Troia, up-and-coming basketologist, why should I bother submitting my next article to you and waiting a year and a half for it? The New Journal of Basketology has a six-month turnaround!
Has anyone else cottoned on to the potential disruptive force of the article-level measurement? Why, yes, as a matter of fact PLoS has! (Genius move, PLoS, by the way. Kudos.) I can't imagine that BMC and Hindawi and others of the gold-open-access ilk won't follow suit; it's too obvious a competitive advantage. Likewise, nothing's stopping toll-access journals from hopping on the bandwagon—adapting, in Scholarly Kitchen's parlance—save perhaps the fear that the numbers would be ugly by comparison, which for some journals wouldn't surprise me at all.
Toll-access publishers of high-impact-factor toll-access journals then find themselves in a bind. If they don't provide article-level metrics, they've fallen behind the state of the art, and will hemorrhage authors to journals that do. If they do, they dissuade more Helen Troias, and given the current problems of access, they may measure up fairly poorly against open-access competitors, at which point they hemorrhage even more authors, not to mention their prior prestige.
And at some point, I should think, the prestige market feeds into the money market. Subscriptions decline, rent-seekers locking up knowledge from readers looks more and more like a losing proposition… utopia? Well, maybe not, but certainly a much more level playing field for gold open access.
For my own part… I published an article last year in Cataloging and Classification Quarterly. You can find its postprint Open Access (see, there I go again!), but that's not because Taylor and Francis usually allows this; it was a special deal, struck when another of the authors in the issue pointed out that it was downright weird for a themed issue on open access not to, er, allow open access.
The journal has another CFP out. I have an idea I really like for an article written to that theme, right down to a gimmicky title stemming from devouring a lot of Fables graphic novels all at once.
But rather than go through negotiations with Taylor and Francis again—and the last time I had to remind them that they'd decided to allow the SPARC Author's Addendum for that issue—or accept preprint-only OA, I think I'll write the article and send it to D-Lib instead.
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Category: Open Access
It's odd to wake up in the morning to discover that I've earned a new Nerd Merit Badge. I for one welcome our new Boing Boing overlords readers, and I thank the marvelous Jessamyn West for the shout-out.
Now. To clear some things up.
It was pointed out in a lengthy comment to the BoingBoinged post that publishers aren't doing this because they're evil; it's Just Bidness. Well, yes, it is. That doesn't require me to refrain from pointing out that Just Bidness in the monolithic-publisher toll-access serials industry is squeezing libraries, destroying university presses and responsible small journal publishers, and locking up knowledge. I don't have to put up with that quietly, and in fact, I myself am in the open-access business, hoping to make a saner, less destructive scholarly-publishing industry so that we in libraries can get on with our jobs.
It's nothing against publishers. I used to work in scholarly publishing, in fact. It's just business.
It was also pointed out that the comparison of the Time and Forbes empire to scholarly publishing is flawed. Absolutely correct. For mass-market news and entertainment publications, writers and readers are not the same people. A few people write; many people read. For scholarly journals, all writers are also readers and quite a lot of readers are writers. (Students, clinicians, and such of the interested public as can manage to climb the barriers to access are usually not research-article writers.) This means that if researchers-as-readers get upset about lack of access, they have power besides market power to rectify the situation: they have their writing, peer-reviewing, and editing labor, which they can withhold.
Thus far, they've mostly been unwilling to use that power. (There are exceptions.) The dominant (though certainly not the only) reason for this unwillingness is the power that influential journals wield over tenure and promotion decisions in academia (which is a long and painful story I won't go into just now).
A wise comment to the Boing Boing post asked about consortia and buying power, remarking that library consortia seemed small and (vis-a-vis market muscle) ineffectual. Well, size and bargaining skill vary, but in the main, the commenter is correct. Libraries, individual and collective, have mostly not used their market power to ameliorate the serials crisis. I'll try to explain why not from my academic librarian's perspective, remarking before I begin that I don't necessarily approve of all these reasons—this post is not a library apologia!—but they're accurate to the best of my understanding.
One reason is that the focus of any good academic library has traditionally been serving the needs of its local population. This inward focus is great for building sensible, well-tailored collections. It tends to obstruct collective action, however. Academic libraries don't think of themselves as a collective; each one thinks of itself as an arm of its parent institution. So outside of some high-flying "memory organization" rhetoric, academic librarians just don't think about the impact of their individual collection decisions on the general scholarly-communication scene.
On my first library-job hunt, I heard "The Big Deal has been very good to us. We can give our faculty much more material than we ever could before," from a library director at a place I was interviewing. Aside from being somewhat short-sighted—I wonder what that library director is thinking now, five short years and at least one renewal cycle later!—it completely shrugs off the damage that the Big Deal has caused in the rest of the system. That, I am sorry to say, is fairly typical librarian thinking.
Another reason is that academic libraries collaborate uneasily and compete fiercely, especially at the research-intensive institutions. Consortia don't exist because libraries like them. Consortia don't exist because libraries want to speak with a powerful uniform voice. Consortia exist only because libraries couldn't function without them. Again, this is a barrier to collective action.
A third reason is that faculty raise holy hell with their librarians when their favorite journal is cancelled. They don't care why. Unlike librarians, they are for the most part completely ignorant of how money sloshes around in the system; practically nobody teaches that in grad school. Like librarians, they also tend to ignore their role in the system, as well as their power to change it, and (I can say from much sad experience) they resist any and all attempts at education. They just want what they want when they want it. You can imagine the power relations there, I'm sure; I'll just say that hell hath no fury like a faculty member who thinks he's been scorned by a mere librarian. "The library is using its market power to punish bad actors and lead eventually to a more equitable and affordable system of scholarly communication" goes over like a lead balloon.
Finally, there's the problem of choked-off information flow in this market. Non-disclosure clauses come standard with journal agreements these days. Libraries often cannot legally tell each other what they're paying for a given journal, package, or database. Of course that's fertile ground for price-gouging. There have been some nudges to this system recently, in the form of public-records requests with which the libraries in question gleefully complied, but the problem remains.
By the way, there was one very interesting exception to the "libraries have just sat there and taken it" rule. In 2003, Cornell University's libraries started a small insurrection against the Big Deal generally and Elsevier specifically, which was followed up by several of Cornell's peer libraries. I was mightily encouraged by this! … But no further market-level actions happened. Saddening.
And there the situation rests churns uneasily, teetering on the edge of breaking down altogether.
By way of epilogue, I'll mention that being BoingBoinged closes a curious circle for me. About a decade ago, when I was a mere conversion peasant, I turned a couple of Cory Doctorow's books from ASCII into HTML so that he could freely distribute them that way (as well as in the then-crop of HTML-based ebook readers). I actually met Cory last year at the Access 2009 conference, and to my considerable surprise and delight, he recognized my name immediately and remembered what I'd done.
Cory is a Good Egg and on the side of the angels. So is Jessamyn. And I'm honored and grateful for the link!
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January 25, 2010
Category: Praxis
I don't hear as much curiosity from the research community as I'd like to about what a librarian knows and does, but I do hear some.
For that some, I suggest poking through the fourth annual iteration of Librarian Day in the Life. A wide variety of librarians blog, tweet, photograph, and vid about what their day is like.
Don't just pay attention to the research-related ones, either. The more people who understand in their bones what public librarians, school librarians, and special librarians add to the communities they serve, the better off everyone is, librarian and community alike.
So go on, find out what we do all day! Hint: It ain't reading books. Or shelving them.
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January 22, 2010
Category: Tidbits
Because I scanted you on tidbits for quite some time, have a second tidbits post in a single week!
Finally, I want to call out the excellent Data Dimensions: Disciplinary Differences report from Key Perspectives. "Data management differs by discipline" is a skeletal truism; Key Perspectives puts some meat on the bones.
It also contains throwaway gems like "It is worth noting that researchers expected their own institutions to be able to provide affordable managed storage, technical support and a preservation facility – but few institutions appear to be able to offer such services at this point." (p. 10)
Incidentally, authors, this institutional-repository administrator's answer to the question "Will institutional repository administrators in a university setting be willing or able to comprehend the details of data formats and metadata schemas across a whole range of disciplines?" (p. 3) is an emphatic "You bet! Bring it on!" Metadata is my business. I'm less bad at it than you might think.
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